I've been thinking about something for a while now. I would like to see a better Starmada-way to represent vessels like Honorverse LACs, Lost Fleet FACs, cutters from the Leary-Mundy books, and things like fighters from 2300AD and books like Downbelow Station. Essentially, these are treated as small starships, which unlike current Starmada fighters, conform to the same movement restrictions as larger ships. As is often mentioned, "space fighters" and other small craft are operating in exactly the same medium as the "ships" that launch them unlike present day aircraft carriers and their fighters. I have played around with adding a "small craft" special equipment to ships which grants no points (as the small craft points are counted towards a fleets total) and requires an amount of SUs equal to the SUs of the ship carried +10%, to "waste" some space for specialized equipment and such. I'm ok with that, and it seems to look alright, at least on paper. The  thing that I have been wrestling with is that in most of the cases I cited above, the "fighter"-type craft have a more powerful armament and often drive capacity than would be capable of a true starship of the same mass. This is usually because the "fighter" has limited range relative to a starship, much less endurance in terms of life support, less space dedicated to crew/comfort, along with a generally more "purpose built" approach. So far It seems that the best way is to give true starships hyperdrives, and short range ships none, freeing up space for weapons and drives. However, in some instances, small craft are capable of some, if limited, hyper-capability. There is also the problem of settings that do not allow "tactical" hyper, in which case I am tempted to just keep the hyperdrive figured in , but "house-rule-out" its in-game ability to escape. I was wondering what some of you thought might be appropriate.
Cheers,
Erik